


On Utility

by alcor



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! GX
Genre: Anal Sex, BDSM, Blindness, Knifeplay, M/M, Masturbation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Oral Sex, Psychological Torture, Senseplay, Sensory Deprivation, Stockholm Syndrome, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:23:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcor/pseuds/alcor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Birthday/Christmas giftfic for Satari-Raine.— Blinded and broken, captured by the enemy, Jim Cook thinks there is nothing left but to wait for death. But he is wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Utility

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Satari](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Satari).



> this is birthdayfic for satari. it was originally supposed to be a drabble. a DRABBLE. it's a christmas fucking miracle. i wrote that expletive for comical emphasis and then i realized it is literally a fucking miracle. a miracle of fucking. it is one am. i'm going to bed.
> 
> warnings: slight torture, dubious consent due to isolation and general horrible, bdsm, knifeplay, senseplay, restraints, eye gore, induced blindness.

If it had only been the dark, Jim could have endured it. Maybe. He could at least have endured it for longer, he thinks; certainly not forever, but for longer. He had already spent six years preparing himself for the dark, getting used to listening harder on his right side, compensating for depth perception. He had confronted the concept that sense-perception of the world was not incorruptible, not untouchable.

But it's not just the dark, is it? - they have him in the silence as well, the thick stone of the walls swallowing sound the way clouds swallow stars. Karen is gone and so he cannot even take comfort in touch. His fingertips are raw and cracked from running them over the rough stone over and over, seeking warmth when it is freezing, seeking cool when the volcanic vents run hot. Sometimes he presses his tongue to his hands, tasting the dirt, his own blood and his sweat. Trying to find something real.

Jim doesn't know where O'Brien is, perhaps dead. Kaiser should be dead by now from his heart alone. It seems as though it's been long enough. Jim only has enough hope left to believe that one survived, and it is probably Shou.

* * *

He could have endured it if it were only the dark; but it is the dark, and the silence, and the cold and heat with nothing between the extremes, and it took maybe six days before he started screaming. He doesn't know how long he screamed. It may have been hours but it felt like days. First, they sent some low-level attendant. Jim tried to spit at him and only succeeded in flecking his own lips. Then, it was a woman, perhaps some female monster judging by the sharpness of her words and the click of her teeth and the mocking laughter behind her feigned sympathy.

Then he came.

Unlike the others, who took pleasure in slipping in as quietly as possible, and standing in odd places within the room, to confuse him and mock him, Ha-ou strides loudly and firmly, allows his armor to click and scrape as he walks, lets his sound announce his presence. He wants to be heard, to be known.

The hollow crash of a helmet striking the floor.

(Juudai, Jim reminds himself, not Ha-ou. He saw Juudai in there. He knows he is in there. He knows he is alive.)

Juudai barely speaks, and when he does, his voice is different, devoid of warmth. Jim can hardly remember what he says at first, the words just seeming to push through him like waves, barely carrying meaning. He has gone four days without food now.

"Why don't you just kill me?" Jim hisses into the wood pallet that serves as a bed for him. He brings one hand up to touch the ruined, still-sticky mess that is his left eye socket. "I'm useless to you anyway."

He hears Juudai step closer, closer, and tries not to cringe away. Juudai says, in that stranger's cadence again, "Nothing in this world is useless. It's only down to whether you will, or will not, be used."

Jim cannot shut his eyelid, nor would it make a difference, but he instinctively turns his head away from the sound. He cannot duel, cannot escape even if the door were wide open, could not save any of his friends so far, and can't if there are any left to save now. He does not want to be told he isn't useless. Not by the thing Juudai has become. Not by the man who took his other eye.

The movement of air tells Jim that Juudai has moved closer, uncomfortably close. His voice turns harsh as a summer storm. "Will you be used?" he demands.

"No!" Jim snaps, though his voice cracks from thirst. The tone of his voice is incredulity; of course he won't, what kind of answer did Juudai expect to a ridiculous question like that? Jim would say no every time to a question like that, and he says so, shouts after the sounds of departure, "You know I won't say any different!" and defiances of that nature.

And yet, some days later, Juudai comes back, and asks the same question in the same four words, and this time Jim has begun to be fed daily instead of every few days, and he feels stronger and more confident, and he laughs in Juudai's face.

It happens a third time, same number of days later, and Jim doesn't laugh this time around. But he says it with as much conviction.

Three days later, he is not asked a question. He is just struck, suddenly, with what feels like a bundle of cloth. "News," Juudai says, just one word, and then leaves.

* * *

The bundle of cloth is a jacket. Jim touches it and crumples it in his hands over and over, the first texture other than stone and his own skin and the slowly disintegrating remnants of his clothing that he's felt in ages.

The realization comes to him slowly that this is a Duel Academy jacket. When it does come, he almost begins to cry with frustration, because he can't tell what color it is, where it is from.

Two days pass, and no one comes except the attendants who drop off food and a few curses before leaving. He begins to wonder if his last answer to Juudai was finally accepted. The jacket is his only connection to what went on in the outside world.

Slowly, he puzzles it out, his mind working over what information he can glean other than color. O'Brien doesn't wear the uniform. Kaiser came in a trenchcoat. The other five were killed. Perhaps it is Juudai's. Perhaps it is a message that he will never return, has abandoned the past.

Jim clings to this theory even though his nose tells him that this jacket doesn't smell quite like Juudai, and the sleeves and hemline are far too short.

* * *

Juudai hasn't returned yet, and Jim has begun to rub his bare feet over the stone because his fingertips are bleeding now, and he needs sensation. He can only move so far from his pallet due to the shackles on his wrists; the chains are only long enough to allow him to stand and walk nine to ten feet from it, far enough to reach the food they bring him and to use the wood pail in the opposite corner as a latrine.

His mind seems to slow down and speed up in odd bursts now. Time is difficult to measure without light, without sounds from outside, without a routine. Jim is aware that he is beginning to lose normalcy. What can he replace it with? The DA jacket - Shou's jacket, admit it - lies in the farthest corner near the door. Jim threw it far from him at one point, in a fit of anger and despair, sick of touching it, of obsessing over it, of wondering whether this meant Shou lived or died. He then regretted it, because now it is beyond his reach, beyond his hands. It's effectively gone from his reality.

Finally, he hears Juudai striding down the hall outside, and for once he feels relieved. He might be informed of some news. He might have the chance to say something to someone other than himself. He might -

the footsteps keep going, and disappear.

An hour after that, Jim starts screaming again, but this time, no one comes. Eventually, he stops, exhausted, and thirsty again.

* * *

Juudai comes again. Jim doesn't know when. Jim lost count.

"Will you be used?" he asks, quiet.

Jim clenches his fists and relaxes them several times in succession. He is confused, and tired, and so glad that someone is here, that Juudai came back. He hates his own happiness. It feels foreign and shameful.

"Used for what?" he asks. Ha-ou only suffers duelists to live. Even his attendants, the people who populate the stronghold and don't go out in the army, duel the prisoners sometimes for fun.

-Juudai, not Ha-ou.

Juudai's voice is strong. "For me."

Jim's heart beats several times in his throat before he answers, "No." But it is a weak answer. He hesitated. He nearly choked on it. He doesn't want Juudai to leave him again. Even though he is a monster now.

There is a long pause, in which Jim can hear every breath that Juudai takes, long and slow and perfectly even. He isn't leaving. "Come here," Juudai says. He doesn't repeat himself, even though Jim doesn't move at first. Then, Jim carefully sits up, steps down from the pallet, weakly stands, and walks towards the sound of Juudai's voice, stopping only when the shackles on his wrists tug him back as the chains go taut.

A cool, wet cloth touches his face, and Jim flinches away near-violently. "Stand still," Juudai orders. He's the one holding it. He's cleaning away the filth from Jim's face, the sticky dried blood and the sweat and whatever else is on there, because Jim can't use his water for anything other than drinking at this point. When Jim's face is clean, Juudai takes each of his hands and cleans them as well, saying nothing, not even when he leaves.

After Jim is certain he is alone completely, his knees buckle beneath him, and he falls to the floor.

* * *

The memory of the touch of the cloth to his face, the coolness on his hands, has invaded Jim's thoughts. He dreams in his sleep about being touched, about something other than stone and chains and his own skin. He keeps rubbing the stone with his feet, but now he tries to keep from chafing his fingers open again, to let them heal. He's begun to think of touching things as "seeing" them.

* * *

And finally, when Juudai returns, Jim cannot endure it any longer.

"Will you be used?" he asks.

Jim, curled up, desperate, broken, whispers, "Please."

He hears a small, unvoiced sigh. Jim doesn't know whether it is of triumph, or relief, or disappointment, or anything at all.

Then Juudai comes to him, presses his lips to Jim's lips and his hands to Jim's shoulders. After weeks, months without being touched, it is the equivalent of a blinding, dizzying light show - sensations all over his skin, heat and cold and trembling. Jim needs this and hates his need, aches for it and hates his body. His empty eye sockets produce tears, painful, itching, wetting his cheeks. Juudai presses his lips to them, licks them away.

Jim loses track of his clothing, can barely remember when his shirt was opened, although it can't come off over his shackles at his wrists. He begins to wish Juudai would take his jeans off, just get it over with, when he feels himself getting hard, his cock straining painfully against the zipper.

Juudai stops, suddenly, steps back. Jim unconsciously stumbles forward, and is nearly jerked back by the chains; at some point, they began moving away from the pallet, and are at the limit of Jim's allowed space.

"Ask me to stay," Juudai says, and there is something dark behind his words.

Jim swallows past the lump in his throat, his breathing dry and shallow, his whole body trembling with need. "P-please stay, Juu-"

Pain. A single strike along his chest, with something Jim cannot tell what it is - it draws two, no, three lines of blood. He gasps and cries aloud. "Ask me to stay," Juudai says again, his voice boiling even darker.

Jim's mind reels. "I - I want you to stay, please, J- Ah!"

Juudai hits him again - Jim thinks it is his gauntlet, the spiked knuckles puncturing and slashing open his skin as it draws crossways over the scratches from last time. He can feel the blood trickling down, a sensation almost like a new and incredibly light set of fingers, and somehow Jim's erection hasn't yet gone away.

Juudai leans closer and blows cool air across the scratches, and Jim finds himself squirming, somehow even more stimulated even through the pain, the dull throbbing beginning in his cuts mirroring the pounding ache in his cock, begging for release.

"Ask _me_ ," Juudai says a third time, "to stay."

Jim is practically straining at his chains. "Ha- Ha-ou," he says. "I beg you - I humbly beseech you to stay. Ha-ou-sama."

"That's better," Ha-ou says, pressing a hand to the lattice of shallow cuts on Jim's chest. "You're beginning to get it." His hand roams down, flicks the button open on Jim's fly, tugs the zipper down. Jim sighs - moans, even - as some of the pressure on his erection is released.

Ha-ou then moves around him, ducks under one of the chains, positions himself behind Jim even as Jim is still facing the door, bare-chested, half-undressed, his cock straining forward and almost exposed. He pulls Jim's jeans and the boxers beneath them all the way down to his knees, exposing him entirely, kicking his legs out wide to support the two of them by the chains pulling his arms and shoulders back alone.

Jim tries to wince silently, but it's beyond him not to groan a little. The air moves across his cuts now, and over his cock, hard and exposed and starting to slick up with pre-come already. For all Jim knows, the door is wide open, and anyone can see him like this. He struggles to keep his breathing even.

Ha-ou presses two fingers to Jim's lips from behind. "Lick them," he orders. Jim opens his mouth, presents his tongue. It's the hand Ha-ou touched the cuts with, salty with his own blood. Jim meant only to lick them, but Ha-ou pushes his fingers past his lips, around his cheeks, beneath his tongue, invading his mouth. Jim gasps a little, sucks at them, groaning, swallowing.

Then Ha-ou takes his fingers out, slick with Jim's saliva, and presses one between Jim's buttocks. "Oh god," Jim moans, already knowing what was coming.

Ha-ou rakes his other hand, fingernails out, across Jim's cuts, causing Jim to howl again in pain - "If you have to speak," Ha-ou whispers, "you may say my name."

So Jim - can't help it, can't stay silent - murmurs "ha-ou-sama" beneath his breath, barely voiced but enough to busy his lungs and throat over and over while the rest of his body screams and sings, full of sensation for the first time in an eternity of waiting. He screams it when the second finger goes in and moves inside him, but he doesn't scream when Ha-ou finally enters him. He stops breathing, a single moment teetered on the edge of non-thought, until his own ejaculation brings him back down, half-aware of anything but the way the air moves across his chest in time with the rocking forward of his hips from behind.

He doesn't even feel Ha-ou finish, or withdraw from him. The next thing he feels is Ha-ou pressing a deck into his hands.

"We begin tomorrow," he says, and is gone.

* * *

Jim dozes fitfully and wakes up unsure if he dreamed the whole thing; an embarrassing, shameful dream. But he touches his chest and feels dried blood in spots on the front of his shirt, shifts the fabric against his skin and feels pangs of pain from the cuts. It happened. His ass is sore, too. It definitely happened.

The deck... He thinks it might be his own. Maybe. Maybe not. He can't see the cards. Can't even tell if he's holding the deck upside down or right-side up. Ha-ou - No, he tells himself, Juudai -

(No, internally, he knows. Juudai is gone. Juudai couldn't have touched him like that. ...Claimed him like that. It hasn't been a whole day yet, and Jim craves to be touched again. After a high so intense, his solitude seems more unbearable, the lack of sensation more maddening, the silence worse than before.)

When Ha-ou arrives, Jim has rearranged all his clothing and attempted to make himself presentable. He even dipped a finger into his water jug to try to scrub out the bloodstains on his shirt. He lost his hat a long, long time ago, so he can only run his fingers through his hair several times.

"Pick up the deck and draw," Ha-ou orders.

Jim takes the deck from the pallet, but hesitates. "Is this... a duel?" he asks.

"Don't ask questions. Draw."

Jim pulls the first card from the top of the deck. To his fingers, each side may as well be blank. Ha-ou says, "Now, tell me what card you've drawn."

Jim freezes. Trembles a little. His fingers turn the card over and over in his hand. Pointless. "I can't," he says. Ha-ou says nothing. "I mean - I can't see," Jim adds. Pointing out the obvious.

A hand suddenly clamps around his own, painfully crushing his knuckles together and digging his fingers into the card, though Ha-ou avoids damaging the card itself. Jim struggles not to gasp. "Fossil Fusion," he growls, and lets go. Jim's hand shakes. "Draw again," Ha-ou adds.

"Wh- ?" Jim stops himself, draws again. Again, Ha-ou asks him to name the card. Again, Jim can't. Again, his hand is forcibly clenched around the card, as if disciplining a child. "Shell Knight." Jim's hand is throbbing.

They do this forty times, for every card in Jim's deck.

Jim has to switch hands at one point. He's stopped questioning it. Both his hands are bruised and aching now. After the last card, Ha-ou just says, "That's enough," and Jim hears him stand to go.

Confused, he calls after, "What now? What's the point?"

Ha-ou stops by the door. He speaks with contempt. "Make yourself useful," he spits, and leaves.

* * *

Jim spends the next day (or, the next period of time between sleeps) puzzling this out in his mind. He has a feeling he may be killed soon. He rubs a hand over the healing cuts on his chest. He has a feeling he has been used for his intended purpose, and is about to be thrown away. Used. Used _up_.

( _Make yourself useful_.)

He hasn't moved a card out of place in his deck since the day before.

What would Jim regret the most before dying? Other than his whole life, that is. Actually, this is the wrong question to ask. It's easy to regret things, after losing everything, after failing. He doesn't want to die, and that's odd. He wanted to die when he first came here. He wanted to end. He wanted Ha-ou to kill him. He had practically begged for a death sentence every time he refused him. Why regret death now?

( _Make yourself useful._ )

Because. It just seems pathetic to die like this, for this reason. Not to die for his defiance, for his uncooperation.

To die for being useless. After he had begged to be used.

( _Make yourself useful_.)

His hand goes to his deck. He pulls the first card off the top. Stupid. He'd said so when Ha-ou first spoke to him. He's useless to him. It was Ha-ou who insisted everything could be used.

Come to think of it, while Jim is on this track, if he'd wanted to just _fuck_ Jim, to break him and humiliate him, he didn't really need to keep asking for permission. For what Jim "willed."

(Almost like he was really still Juudai, somewhere in there. Almost like -  
these thoughts are dangerous.)

Jim turns the card over, and -

And as sudden as a brightly-colored bird flashing out from being hidden in a bush, the sound explodes into his mind: "Fossil Fusion." He can feel the ghost of a hand around his hand. His fingertips brush four barely perceptible dents in the surface of the card stock.

Marks of Jim's own fingernails, when they were pressed into the card.

( _That's enough.  
Make yourself useful_.)

Jim, with trembling hands, draws the second card. He might - he might have replaced each card beneath the deck in order, when they went through it yesterday. He turns it over, brushes its surface - Three dents, in different places. He turns it back over and replaces his fingers where they would have been, ignoring the creak of his bruised joints.

The ghost of an echo: "Shell Knight," in his mind.

Jim is sweating now.

"Make myself useful," he whispers aloud.

* * *

Ha-ou doesn't return for five days.

In those five days, Jim memorizes the feel of the surface of every single card in his deck.

The door opens, and Jim sits up straight, his hands curled around his deck.

"Are you ready?" Ha-ou asks, simply, and Jim nods. He begins to pull the first card off the top - "Not yet," Ha-ou says. He steps up to Jim, takes the deck from his hands. Jim can hear him shuffle it. He replaces it in Jim's hands. "Now."

Jim draws, turns the card over and feels it. "Sakuretsu Armor," he says. Ha-ou takes the card from his hand. "Correct," he says, returning it. "Next one."

Jim draws again. "Sample Fossil."

Ha-ou checks it again. "Correct again," he says, and now an undercurrent of interest is sparking in his voice. "Next."

Jim draws. "Half Life," he says. He's confident now.

Ha-ou takes it. Then, he returns it to Jim's hand without saying whether it was right or wrong. "You've become very useful," he says, and Jim can't help it - he's proud, he's proud and euphoric, he pulled himself from the brink of death.

"I - " he doesn't know how to voice this - "I'm glad. Ha-ou-sama."

Ha-ou touches his chin, tilts his head up a little. His little finger rests over Jim's pulse. "Are you," he says, barely a question. Then, and Jim almost swears he hears an emotion other than contempt or impatience in his voice, almost as if Ha-ou is _pleased_ \- "You want to be used, again?"

Jim's heart is in his throat. "Yes," he says, "I do."

* * *

This time, Ha-ou undresses from the waist up, allows Jim to touch him everywhere, to see his body. Jim can barely connect this body with what he knows of Juudai - of the man Ha-ou used to be. He is hard now, burned down to lean, starved muscle and bones. Jim almost sheds tears when he runs his hands over Ha-ou's face, and Ha-ou grips his wrist and pulls his hand away.

"Enough," he says. He sits on the pallet, pushes Jim to his knees. Jim hears him undoing his belt, and then Jim is pulled forward, between his knees, his face coming up against Ha-ou's erect cock.

Jim takes him in and begins to suck him, and brings his hands up to help take him around the base - but Ha-ou grabs his hand again. "I said enough," he says, and pushes them away. Jim whines in the back of his throat in confusion. "Touch anything else you like," Ha-ou adds.

At first, Jim just tries to balance, on his knees with the warmth of Ha-ou's legs around his ribs, his cock hardening in his mouth - but then Jim realizes what he could be doing. He undoes his shirt, while still moving and sucking around Ha-ou, and undoes his pants, slipping one hand around himself. He was already beginning to heat up just a little, but touching himself now speeds the process.

Maybe, maybe Jim should mind being orally penetrated like this, but he's somehow excited. He's useful again, giving Ha-ou what he can't get from a castle full of monsters. Giving Ha-ou someone who cares about him, even though Jim couldn't save him or anyone else in the end. If it's just them left - if it's just them, in hell - he doesn't mind. He has nowhere else to go. He can't go back to scraping his limbs on the stone until he bled just to feel something, screaming and having the sound swallowed up.

So he touches himself while he groans into Ha-ou's cock, sometimes lapping at the tip, sometimes taking him deep and panting into him, and Jim can feel his own erection growing, the pleasure pulling through him, something blooming again after blooming and withering once. He slows down on himself when he tastes pre-come, concentrating harder on Ha-ou's cock until the come floods his mouth. He gulps, not even daring to sputter, swallows a second time, breathes through his nose.

Ha-ou wastes no time, standing up, not even replacing his breeches and belt. Then he touches Jim on the arm that's still down his own pants, his erection up but unfinished. "Lie back," he orders.

Jim does, and suddenly he hears a sound that he can't describe, and two foreign hands pull his arms back, over his head. He yelps, shocked at the sudden foreign presence, and Ha-ou says, "Malicious Edge. Hands." Something – the Duel Monster? - slices through the chains still attached to the wall, leaving the shackles around Jim's wrists but not bound to anything, allowing his arms to fully reach the floor, the strange hands pinning his own. His palms, empty; his fingers, touching nothing, face the ceiling. It feels like being deprived of sight again.

He feels Ha-ou straddle him, on his knees. And then he feels – something warm and tight around his cock, moving down - weight shifting across his hips and stomach heavily. Is – is Ha-ou _riding_ him?! Jim opens his mouth but before he speaks, Ha-ou's hand is wrapped around the lower part of his jaw. "Who do you really think has the power here?" he asks. It's so silly, so basic – Jim Is being held _down_ , for crying out loud – that Jim's first instinctive reaction is to laugh. He swallows the second laugh almost immediately, worried that he's overstepped, gone too far, endangered himself.

But then he hears it. Actually, he feels it first; a vibration through their bodies.

Ha-ou laughed a little, too.

(And for a moment, he sounded so much like –  
these are dangerous thoughts.)

* * *

Jim isn't done making himself useful yet. Ha-ou comes to him more often, does more drills with him, makes him arrange and rearrange his deck before calling the cards out. After a while, he begins mock-dueling him – that is, Jim draws as if he were dueling, and Ha-ou calls combos, his arms crossed so that his iron gauntlets screech across one another.

Sometimes Jim makes errors. He can get tired, after all, and even the sharpest mind can forget or lose track. Once in a while, he misreads a card if he is in too great a hurry, or if he is nervous. He isn't punished for them – at the moments he makes them in, at any rate. Ha-ou might keep a running tally for their own punishment games.

They fuck, sometimes. Not terribly often. Usually once every ten to fourteen days. Jim doesn't mind that it's rough, painful, usually degrading. It's somehow harder to feel humiliated or ashamed when he can't see how he is being looked at. When there is no one who matters anymore to feel ashamed for. There's a kind of liberation, when the pain and pleasure tear his mind free from tethers, from regrets or guilt or boredom. And –

and after it is done, while Jim is still barely coherent, still bloodied and battered, his thoughts still stretched far and wide and soft, sometimes Ha-ou stays. Salves the worst of his cuts or burns. Silently pulls his fingers through Jim's hair, checks Jim's pulse, calls his name low until Jim's thoughts clear again, sharpen back into focus.

His shackles were never even replaced after their second time together. Jim can walk to any part of his cell.

(The jacket was gone, when he remembered to search for where he'd thrown it. It must have been taken away a long time ago. Or maybe it had never been there. Maybe he'd imagined that episode entirely.)

* * *

One day, Ha-ou brings someone with him. Some nameless Dark World rabble. "This goblin was sentenced to die for stealing," he says. "Normally he would be executed publicly without the chance to duel for his life." An ignominious death here. "But, mercifully, I have seen fit to allow him the honor anyway."

Jim's first live duel. He clenches his deck. "I understand," he says.

The creature's voice is nasal and grating, and it sounds disbelieving of his own luck. "A blind prisoner? Oh sire, thank you, I know I have always served you faithfully – " He thinks it's a gimme. He thinks he's being secretly granted his freedom.

"Another word that isn't 'I draw,' and I rescind my favor," Ha-ou snaps.

Jim wins without taking damage.

* * *

It isn't long after Jim's first win, first duel since his capture.

Ha-ou comes to him, instructs him to take his deck in his right hand and extend his left. A cool, round object is placed into Jim's left hand. Ha-ou curls his hand around it for him. Jim knows this object intimately. His right eye socket tingles.

The Eye of Orichalcum.

"You are a duelist again," Ha-ou says. His voice is soft. "You have the right to challenge me."

To duel him once more. To try again, with the deck he knows as well as his own soul. To throw his life away, join his friends. To attempt to save Juudai one last time.

To slay the thing he's become, if he can.

They stand there, for a long time. Jim runs the Eye through his fingers over and over again. If he replaced it in his right eye socket – he'd have to sterilize it with fire, maybe – he could try to peer into Juudai's soul again. If even the Eye could penetrate that darkness now, after how long it's been.

(And yet, Jim feels as though that would show him nothing he doesn't already know.

Nothing he hasn't already seen with his hands, with his tongue and teeth, with his ears and his memory and by calling out the cards of his deck. With every inch of his skin.)

"I _am_ a duelist," he says. Feels the shifting of Ha-ou's weight in the floor, his breath changing. Jim steps forward with one foot, but only to lower himself with the other leg. Until he is on his knees. He opens his hand. The Eye clatters away, strikes the stone and bounces with a clear tone, rolls with a glass _garagara_ sound to some corner where it settles. Jim's head bows. He waits.

A hand touches his shoulder. Moves to his chin, lifts it.

"Why?" Ha-ou asks.

Jim smiles. "I don't have any use for it."


End file.
